


Bookends

by forever_doodling_tardises



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M, cassette tapes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:42:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1736714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forever_doodling_tardises/pseuds/forever_doodling_tardises
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been years, and Castiel still hadn't done anything with the box of cassette tapes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bookends

It had been years, and Castiel still hadn't done anything with the box of cassette tapes. He knew he should give them to Sam, or donate them, or at least _put them away somewhere_ , but he couldn't bear to let go of this last part of Dean, the part that was gathering dust as it stared down at him from the shelf.

He had taken the cassettes from the Impala in the days after his Fall, curious as to their mechanics. Dean had taught him everything there was to know, had even bought him a portable cassette deck. In the weeks after Dean's death, which came in the late autumn, he would play the tapes over and over again, lingering on his favorites and Dean's, but he soon realized that this only exacerbated the already overpowering emotions of loss, grief, and bitterness. He knew that Dean would understand these feelings, that if Dean were here, he could help Castiel through this unbearable, all-too-foreign pain. But then again, Dean not being there, Dean never being there again, was the reason he was feeling these emotions.

Now, six months after Dean's death, the box of cassette tapes just sat on the shelf that jutted out from the wall of the makeshift living room in the small, rather removed from civilization house that the former angel now occupied. The tapes rested right above the cassette player, which Castiel had placed atop a low cabinet.

A strange circumstance of Castiel's Fall was that he'd kept his memories of the time before it. _It is a bit unfair,_ he thought idly, lifting the box down from the shelf for the first time in months. _On the one hand, some of these memories are the happiest - can I call a time before I experienced true emotions 'happy'? - of my life, but on the other, they are torturous._ Such were his musings as he lifted and gently pushed aside tapes, searching for one in particular. He had found it about a week after Dean's death, buried at the bottom of the box as though it didn't want to be found, or someone didn't want him finding it. The label read, in Dean's instantly recognizable handwriting:

Bookends - Simon and Garfunkel

The style of music seemed so unlike Dean, and at first Castiel thought and thought, worried and worried about all the other things he didn't know about Dean and would never get a chance to find out. Eventually, though, he came to accept these unknowable facts as a part of Dean and of his memory, and made peace with them.

Now, for the first time since what felt like both years ago and yesterday, he slotted the tape into the cassette player and pressed play.


End file.
